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5. Geological Field Techniques 1st Edition Angela L. Coe
Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Angela L. Coe, TomW Argles, David ARothery, Robert ASpicer
ISBN(s): 1444330624
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 32.60 MB
Year: 2010
Language: english

8. GEOLOGICAL FIELD TECHNIQUES

9. Cartoons by Ian Wightman
Front cover image: Carboniferous age (Namurian) rocks exposed at Sugar Sands Bay, near
Alnwick, Northumberland, UK. These are part of a succession of rocks interpreted as infill of an
interdistributary bay or lagoon along the shore of a delta. Superimposed on the photograph is
part of a graphic log of the succession summarizing the thickness of the units, lithology,
sedimentary structures and cycles. (Angela L. Coe, The Open University, UK.)
Back cover images (in descending order):
1. Walcott Quarry, Canadian Rockies during 1998 showing the exposure of the Burgess Shale
(Cambrian) that is famous for the exceptional soft body preservation of some of the oldest
fossils on Earth. (Angela L. Coe, The Open University, UK.)
2. Geologists working on the organic-rich mudrocks of the Monterey Formation (Miocene),
Naples Beach, California, USA. (Anthony S. Cohen, The Open University, UK.)
3. Asymmetric folds in Proterozoic strata, Harvey’s Return, Kangaroo Island, Australia. Lens
cap is 5.5cm across. (Tom W. Argles, The Open University, UK.)
4. A Silva compass-clinometer being used to measure the dip of a fault plane, Whitesands Bay,
St David’s, Wales, UK. (Tom W. Argles, The Open University, UK.)
5. The ammonite Psiloceras planorbis (J. de C. Sowerby) from the Lias Group, UK.
This species defines the lowermost ammonite zone of the Jurassic. Ammonite is c. 4cm
across. (Peter R. Sheldon, The Open University, UK.)
Companion Website: A companion resources site for this book is available at
www.wiley.com/go/coe/geology
With:
• All figures and tables from the book
• Additional excercises and answers
• Useful websites, selected by the authors

10. GEOLOGICAL FIELD TECHNIQUES
Edited by Angela L. Coe
Authors:
Angela L. Coe
Tom W. Argles
David A. Rothery
Robert A. Spicer
Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences,
The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, UK
A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

11. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
in association with
The Open University
Walton Hall, Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA
United Kingdom
First published 2010
Copyright © 2010, The Open University
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or
utilised in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without written
permission from the publisher or a licence from the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd. Details of such licences (for
reprographic reproduction) may be obtained from the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby
Street, London EC1N 8TS (website www.cla.co.uk).
Open University course materials may also be made available in electronic formats for use by students of the
University. All rights, including copyright and related rights and database rights, in electronic course materials and
their contents are owned by or licensed to The Open University, or otherwise used by The Open University as
permitted by applicable law.
In using electronic course materials and their contents you agree that your use will be solely for the purposes of
following an Open University course of study or otherwise as licensed by The Open University or its assigns.
Except as permitted above you undertake not to copy, store in any medium (including electronic storage or use in a
website), distribute, transmit or retransmit, broadcast, modify or show in public such electronic materials in whole or
in part without the prior written consent of The Open University or in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
Typeset by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited.
Printed and bound in Malaysia.
The paper used in this publication is procured from forests independently certified to the level of Forest Stewardship
Council (FSC) principles and criteria. Chain of custody certification allows the tracing of this paper back to specific
forest-management units (see www.fsc.org).
Details of Open University courses can be obtained from the Student Registration and Enquiry Service,
The Open University, PO Box 197, Milton Keynes MK7 6BJ, United Kingdom
(tel. +44 (0)845 300 60 90, email general-enquiries@open.ac.uk).
www.open.ac.uk
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Geological field techniques / edited by Angela L. Coe.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4443-3061-8 (hardback)
ISBN 978-1-4443-3062-5 (paperback)
1. Geology–Fieldwork. I. Coe, Angela L.
QE45.G46 2010
550.072'3–dc22
2010016419

12. v
Contents
Preface x
Acknowledgements xi
1 INTRODUCTION 1
1.1 A selection of general books and reference material on geology 2
1.2 Books on geological field techniques 3
2 FIELD EQUIPMENT AND SAFETY 4
2.1 Introduction 4
2.2 The hand lens and binoculars 5
2.3 The compass-clinometer 6
2.3.1 Orientation of a dipping plane 11
2.3.2 Orientation of a linear feature 16
2.3.3 Triangulation: Determining location using a compass 20
2.4 Global positioning systems and altimeters 25
2.5 Measuring distance and thickness 26
2.5.1 Standard thickness and distance measurements 26
2.5.2 Use of the Jacob staff to measure the thickness of
inclined strata 27
2.6 Classification and colour charts 28
2.7 Hammer, chisels and other hardware 31
2.8 The hardcopy field notebook 33
2.9 The laptop, netbook or PDA as a notebook 34
2.10 Writing equipment, maps and relevant literature 35
2.10.1 Writing equipment 35
2.10.2 Maps and relevant literature 35
2.11 Comfort, field safety and field safety equipment 36
2.11.1 Clothes, backpack/rucksack and personal provisions 36
2.11.2 Field safety 36
2.11.3 Field safety equipment 39
2.12 Conservation, respect and obtaining permission 40
2.13 Further reading 41
3 INTRODUCTION TO FIELD OBSERVATIONS AT DIFFERENT SCALES 42
3.1 Introduction: What, where and how? 42
3.1.1 Defining the fieldwork objectives 42
3.1.2 Deciding where to do the fieldwork 43
3.1.3 Locating your position 45
3.2 Scale of observation, where to start and basic measurements 45
3.2.1 Regional context 45
3.2.2 Whole exposure 46
3.2.3 Hand specimens 49
3.3 Overview of possible data formats 51

13. vi Contents
4 THE FIELD NOTEBOOK 53
4.1 Introduction: The purpose of field notes 53
4.2 Field notebook layout 54
4.2.1 Preliminary pages 54
4.2.2 Daily entries 54
4.2.3 General tips 56
4.3 Field sketches: A picture is worth a thousand words 57
4.3.1 General principles: Aims, space and tools 59
4.3.2 Sketches of exposures 63
4.3.3 Sketching metre- and centimetre-scale features 67
4.3.4 Sketch maps 68
4.4 Written notes: Recording data, ideas and interpretation 72
4.4.1 Notes recording data and observations 72
4.4.2 Notes recording interpretation, discussion and ideas 72
4.5 Correlation with other data sets and interpretations 77
5 RECORDING PALAEONTOLOGICAL INFORMATION 79
5.1 Introduction: Fossils are smart particles 79
5.1.1 Why are fossils important? 79
5.1.2 Collecting fossil data 80
5.2 Fossil types and preservation 82
5.2.1 Body fossil classification 82
5.2.2 Body fossil preservation 82
5.2.3 Trace fossils 85
5.2.4 Molecular fossils 87
5.3 Fossil distribution and where to find them 87
5.3.1 Transported or life position? 88
5.4 Sampling strategies 90
5.4.1 Sampling for biostratigraphic or evolutionary studies 90
5.4.2 Sampling of bedding surfaces and palaeoecology 92
5.5 Estimating abundance 95
5.5.1 Presence/absence and qualitative abundance estimates 96
5.5.2 Quantitative measures of abundance 96
5.5.3 How many samples are required? 99
5.6 Summary 100
5.7 Further reading 101
6 RECORDING FEATURES OF SEDIMENTARY ROCKS AND
CONSTRUCTING GRAPHIC LOGS 102
6.1 Introduction 102
6.2 Description, recognition and recording of sedimentary deposits
and sedimentary structures 104
6.2.1 Recording sedimentary lithology 104
6.2.2 Recording sedimentary structures 109
6.3 Graphic logs 117
6.3.1 Conventions for graphic logs 119
6.3.2 Constructing a graphic log 121
6.4 Rocks in space: Reconstructing sedimentary environments and
their diagnostic features 127

14. vii
Contents
6.5 Using sedimentary rocks to interpret climate change and sea-level change 133
6.5.1 Climate change 134
6.5.2 Sequence stratigraphy and relative sea-level change 134
6.6 Further reading 137
7 RECORDING FEATURES OF IGNEOUS ROCKS 139
7.1 Equipment, basic tips and safety 139
7.2 Field relationships of igneous rocks 140
7.2.1 Relationships with surrounding rocks 140
7.2.2 Internal architecture: Joints and veins 144
7.2.3 Internal architecture: Other exposure-scale fabrics 146
7.3 Mineralogy and small-scale textures of igneous rocks 154
7.3.1 Petrologic type 155
7.3.2 Mineral texture and fabric 155
7.4 Recent and active volcanoes 159
7.4.1 Equipment and safety 159
7.4.2 Access 160
7.4.3 Observations 160
7.5 Further reading 161
8 RECORDING STRUCTURAL INFORMATION 163
8.1 Equipment and measurement 164
8.1.1 Structural measurements and notations 164
8.2 Brittle structures: Faults, joints and veins 165
8.2.1 Planar brittle features – orientation 165
8.2.2 Determining past motion on brittle structures 170
8.3 Ductile structures: Shear zones, foliations and folds 176
8.3.1 Orientation of ductile planar features 176
8.3.2 Direction of shear/stretching: Stretching lineations 180
8.3.3 Sense of shear: Kinematic indicators 182
8.3.4 Magnitude of shear strain 185
8.3.5 Fold analysis 185
8.4 Further reading 191
9 RECORDING FEATURES OF METAMORPHIC ROCKS 192
9.1 Basic skills and equipment for metamorphic fieldwork 192
9.1.1 Field relations and context 192
9.2 Textures 194
9.2.1 Banding 194
9.2.2 Grain textures 196
9.2.3 Reaction textures 197
9.3 Mineralogy 198
9.3.1 Identifying common metamorphic minerals 198
9.3.2 Using mineral assemblages 198
9.3.3 Classification of metamorphic rocks 200
9.4 Unravelling metamorphism and deformation 201
9.4.1 Pre-kinematic features 202
9.4.2 Syn-kinematic features 202
9.4.3 Post-kinematic features 203
9.5 Further reading 205

15. viii Contents
10 MAKING A GEOLOGICAL MAP 206
10.1 Principles and aims 206
10.2 Preparation and materials 207
10.2.1 Base maps and other aids 207
10.2.2 Equipment for mapping 212
10.3 Location, location, location 214
10.3.1 Equipment 214
10.3.2 Using base maps 214
10.4 Making a field map 216
10.4.1 Information to record on field maps 216
10.4.2 The evolving map 218
10.4.3 Sketch cross-sections 221
10.5 Mapping techniques 222
10.5.1 Traverse mapping 223
10.5.2 Contact mapping 225
10.5.3 Exposure mapping 226
10.5.4 Using other evidence 228
10.6 The geological map 233
10.6.1 Inking in the field map 233
10.6.2 Cross-sections 235
10.6.3 Fair copy maps 235
10.6.4 Digital maps and GIS 239
10.7 Further reading 240
11 RECORDING NUMERICAL DATA AND USE OF INSTRUMENTS IN THE FIELD 241
11.1 Data collection 241
11.1.1 Instrument calibration and base stations 244
11.1.2 Survey grids 244
11.2 Transport and protection of the instruments 245
11.3 Correlation with other data sets 245
11.4 Further reading 246
12 PHOTOGRAPHY 247
13 SAMPLING 250
13.1 Selecting and labelling samples 250
13.1.1 Samples for thin-sections 251
13.1.2 Orientated samples 251
13.1.3 Samples for geochemical analysis 253
13.1.4 Samples for mineral extraction 253
13.1.5 Samples for fossils 253
13.1.6 Sampling for regional studies 254
13.1.7 High-resolution sample sets 254
13.1.8 Labelling samples and their packaging 255
13.2 Practical advice 256
13.2.1 Packing and marking materials 256
13.2.2 Extraction of samples 257
14 CONCLUDING REMARKS 259
14.1 Further reading on scientific report writing 260

16. ix
Contents
REFERENCES 261
APPENDIX A1: GENERAL 263
APPENDIX A5: FOSSILS 265
APPENDIX A6: SEDIMENTARY 273
APPENDIX A7: IGNEOUS 293
APPENDIX A8: STRUCTURAL 296
APPENDIX A9: METAMORPHIC 302
APPENDIX A10: MAPPING 306
Index 310

17. x
Preface
Working in the field contributes a crucial element to our knowledge and understanding of Earth
processes, whether it is the prediction of volcanic eruptions, understanding periods of past
climate change recorded in sedimentary deposits, deciphering an episode of mountain building,
or working out where to find mineral resources. Without primary field data and geological
samples of the highest quality, further scientific study such as sophisticated isotope
measurements or the reconstruction of past life assemblages and habitats is at best without
context, and at worst, completely meaningless.
Geological fieldwork can be both fun and challenging. It provides the chance to work outdoors
under a range of conditions and to explore our natural world. It also provides an often
unparalleled opportunity to travel and visit localities as more than a tourist. Indeed it often
takes you to unspoilt parts of the world that tourists rarely penetrate. Almost all fieldwork
enables us to work as part of a team, often with international partners, and this can be one of
the most rewarding experiences of being a geologist because we can learn from each other.
Many long-term friendships have been forged through geological fieldwork.
This book is aimed primarily at undergraduates studying geology and Earth sciences. It will also
potentially be of use to engineers, archaeologists and environmental scientists who need to
collect information on the bedrock. The increasingly multidisciplinary nature of science will
make the text useful to masters, doctoral and professional scientists who do not have a
background in practical geology or Earth science. The book is non-site specific and includes
examples from around the world. There are chapters covering data collection from igneous,
metamorphic and sedimentary rocks as well as specific chapters on palaeontological and
structural data collection. It also deals with the basics of geological mapping.
The book assumes a basic understanding of the main concepts and theory in geology. It assumes
that the reader is familiar with: the major rock-forming minerals, how to identify minerals in
hand specimen, rock classification, geological processes and common geological terms. The
further reading lists at the ends of the chapters provide a selection of introductory geological
texts as well as more specialist ones. In addition there are appendices summarizing key
geological features and classification schemes. There is also an accompanying website (www.
wiley.com/go/coe/geology) with all of the figures, tables, links to other websites and other
material. Reviews of the original book proposal suggested expansion of certain chapters and even
the deletion of others, however, none of the reviewers agreed on which chapters these should be
so clearly it is a matter of personal preference. We have therefore kept to the broad overview, and
refer the reader to more specialist fieldwork texts that are available, and hope that this book
inspires others to write textbooks on more specific fieldwork topics that are not available.
Writing a book on field techniques has long been an ambition of mine; the style and
organization has had a lengthy gestation period during many months of fieldwork, both as a
researcher and a university lecturer. I am delighted that when I was eventually able to spend
some time completing this task I was joined by a number of colleagues who had expertise that
complemented my own; it has been a pleasure to work with them. I would like to thank all the
colleagues, PhD students and undergraduate students that I have worked with. My experience of
being with them in the field has helped me to shape this book.
Wishing you both enjoyable and highly productive fieldwork.
Angela L. Coe
The Open University, November 2009

18. xi
Acknowledgements
Ian Francis and Kelvin Matthews of Wiley-Blackwell are thanked for their support and advice and for
managing the production of this book. We are grateful to Harry Langford for copy editing. We would also like
to thank Jim Iley of The Open University and Susan Francis and Matt Lloyd of Cambridge University Press for
their enthusiastic support in the initial stages of this project. The help of The Open University co-publication
team – Giles Clark, David Vince and Christianne Bailey – is gratefully acknowledged. Ruth Drage is thanked
for her help in managing the artwork part of the project and for her input to the book design.
We are very grateful to Tiffany Barry, Kate Bradshaw, Richard Brown, Brian McDonald, Susan Ramsay,
Janet Sumner, Paul Temple and Clare Warren, all of whom were brave enough to lend us their field
notebooks for reproduction in this book. We are also grateful to Kate Andrew and Susie Clarke who kindly
allowed us to copy part of their geological field and fair copy maps. The unpublished field notes of these
individuals are accredited in the figure captions.
Many thanks go to Ian Wightman whose inspiring and amusing cartoons have livened up this book.
Andrew Tindle (The Open University) is thanked for his excellent photography of most of the hand
specimens (particularly Chapters 8 and 9) and for providing a set-up for photographing specimens and
field notebooks. Various colleagues have allowed us to reproduce their photographs in this book, for which
we are grateful. These individuals are acknowledged in the figure captions. Andrew Whitehead and David
DuPlessis with the help of Chris Hough and Jon Owen (The Open University) prepared the final version of
the figures. Richard Howes is thanked for general assistance with the electronic files. We are grateful to
Andrew Lloyd for help with scanning, image processing and also for contributing to the design and
preparation of the cover image for this book.
We are grateful to all of the anonymous academic reviewers contacted by Wiley-Blackwell and Cambridge
University Press who provided feedback and ideas on the book proposal. Susan Ramsay (University of
Glasgow), Ian Parkinson (The Open University), Clare Warren (The Open University) and two anonymous
reviewers contacted by Wiley-Blackwell are thanked for their comments on earlier versions of this
manuscript.
Last, but not least, we would like to thank our field colleagues, and students, for interesting and
stimulating discussion in the field.
Figure acknowledgements
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for previously published figures (for full references see
pp. 261–262):
Map extracts in Figures 2.11, 2.12, 10.1a, 10.1b and 10.5. Reproduced with permission of the Ordnance Survey on
behalf of Her Majesty’s Stationary Office. © Crown Copyright 2010. All rights reserved; Figure 5.13: Spicer, R. A., and
Hill, C. R. 1979. ‘Principal components. …’ Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology. Elsevier Inc; Figure 6.10: Coe, A. L.
1996. ‘Unconformities within. …’ in Special Publication No. 103, 1996. The Geological Society, London; Figures 6.13b
and 6.14: Alexander, J. 1992. ‘Nature and origin of. …’, Journal of the Geological Society, Vol 149. Copyright © 1992
The Geological Society; Figure 7.16: Lippard, S. J. et al. 1986. The Ophiolite of Northern Oman. Copyright © 1986 The
Geological Society; Figure 10.2b: Watts, D. R. et al. (2005) ‘Mapping granite and. …’, Geological Society of America
Bulletin, Vol. 117. Copyright © 2005 Geological Society of America; Figure A5.4: After Goldring, R. 1991. Fossils in the
Field. Copyright © 1991 Longman Group UK Limited; Figure A5.6: After North American Commission on Stratigraphic
Nomenclature 1983. AAPG © 1983. American Association of Petroleum Geologists; Figures A6.9a, A6.9b and A6.13:
After Stow, D. A. V. 2005. Sedimentary Rocks in the Field. Copyright © 2005 Manson Publishing Ltd; Figure A10.2:
After McClay, K. R. 1991. The Mapping of Geological Structures. Geological Society of London Handbook.
Copyright © K. R. McClay. John Wiley and Sons.
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. If any have been inadvertently overlooked we will be pleased
to make the necessary amendments at the first opportunity.

20. 1
Introduction
1
1 Introduction
Angela L. Coe
The main aim of field geology is to observe and collect data
from rocks and/or unconsolidated deposits, which will further
our understanding of the physical, chemical and biological
processes that have occurred over geological time. Many of the
basic observational principles used in field geology have not
changed for hundreds of years, although the interpretation of
the data, the scale of resolution and some of the equipment has
advanced greatly. Fieldwork involves making careful
observations and measurements in the field (Figure 1.1a) and
the collection and precise recording of the position of samples
for laboratory analysis (Figure 1.1b). The very act of collecting
field data often raises questions about processes on Earth,
which had perhaps not previously been envisaged.
Furthermore, during fieldwork it is usual to initiate, or to build
on, constructing and testing different hypotheses and
interpretations based on the observations; this iterative process
will help to determine the essential data and samples to
collect.
This book is divided into 14 chapters. Chapter 2 covers the
most commonly used field equipment and outlines field safety
procedures. Chapter 3 explores the general objectives of
fieldwork and how to make a start. Chapter 4 is devoted to the
production of a field notebook (hard copy or electronic), as this
is the key record of geological field data. The bulk of the book
comprises five chapters covering the necessary skills for the
collection of palaeontological (Chapter 5), sedimentological
(Chapter 6), igneous (Chapter 7), structural (Chapter 8) and
metamorphic data (Chapter 9). Chapter 10 uses the field
techniques covered in the previous five chapters to introduce
geological mapping, where it is usually necessary to deal with
a range of rock types and different kinds of exposure*. The
book concludes with short chapters on recording numerical
and geophysical data (Chapter 11), photography (Chapter 12)
and sampling (Chapter 13).
*The term exposure is used to indicate areas where rocks are visible at the
Earth’s surface. This is in contrast to the term outcrop which also encompasses
those areas where the rock is at the Earth’s surface but is covered by superficial
deposits and soil.
Geological Field Techniques, 1st
edition. Edited by Angela L. Coe. © 2010 by
The Open University.
Figure 1.1 (a) Geologists
collecting data for a graphic log
(Section 6.3) to record how a
sedimentary succession has changed
through time and to decipher the
overall depositional environment.
By working together they can share
tasks and discuss their observations.
(b) The recessed bed marks the
Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary at
Woodside Creek, near Kekerengu,
New Zealand. Note the holes
where samples have been
extracted for palaeomagnetism
studies. In this case the number of
holes is rather excessive and
breaks the code of good practice
(Section 2.12 and Chapter 13). (a
and b: Angela L. Coe, The Open
University, UK.)
(a)
(b)
0.5 m

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at the sacrifice of beautiful scenery, of a successful propaganda of
cigarette-smoking, and of all sorts of proprietary articles landed well
home in their gastric target of a whole life lost, indeed, in
commercial self-seeking, with "What shall I render unto the Lord for
all his benefits?"
"The Now is an atom of Sand,
And the Near is a perishing Clod,
But Afar is a fairyland,
And Beyond is the Bosom of God."
What I have to insist upon now is that this is a sample, and, so far
as I can tell, a fair sample, of the quality and trend of the mind-stuff

23. and the breadth and height of the tradition of a large and I know not
how influential mass of prosperous middle-class English, and of a
much more prosperous and influential and important section of
Americans. They represent much energy, they represent much
property, they are a factor to reckon with. They present a powerful
opposing force to anything that will suppress their disgusting notice-
boards or analyze their ambiguous "proprietary articles," or tax their
gettings for any decent public purpose. And here I find them selling
poisons as pain-killers, and alcohol as tonics, and fighting ably and
boldly to silence adverse discussion. In the face of the great needs
that lie before America their active trivality of soul, their energy and
often unscrupulous activity, and their quantitative importance
become, to my mind, adverse and threatening, a stumbling-block for
hope. For the impression I have got by going to and fro in America is
that Mr. Richards is a fair sample of at least the older type of
American. So far as I can learn, Mr. J.D. Rockefeller is just another
product of the same cult. You meet these older types everywhere,
they range from fervent piety and temperance to a hearty drinking,
"story"-telling, poker-playing type, but they have in common a
sharp, shrewd, narrow, business habit of mind that ignores the
future and the state altogether. But I do not find the younger men
are following in their lines. Some are. But just how many and to
what extent, I do not know. It is very hard for a literary man to
estimate the quantity and importance of ideas in a community. The
people he meets naturally all entertain ideas, or they would not
come in his way. The people who have new ideas talk; those who
have not, go about their business. But I hazard an opinion that
Young America now presents an altogether different type from the
young men of enterprise and sound Baptist and business principles
who were the backbone of the irresponsible commercial America of
yesterday, the America that rebuilt Chicago on "floating
foundations," covered the world with advertisement boards, gave
the great cities the elevated railroads, and organized the trusts.
III
Oneida

24. I spent a curious day amid the memories of that strangely interesting
social experiment, the Oneida Community, and met a most
significant contemporary, "live American" of the newer school, in the
son of the founder and the present head of "Oneida Limited."
There are moments when that visit I paid to Oneida seems to me to
stand for all America. The place, you know, was once the seat of a
perfectionist community; the large red community buildings stand
now among green lawns and ripening trees, and I dined in the
communal dining-room, and visited the library, and saw the chain
and trap factory, and the silk-spinning factory and something of all
its industries. I talked to old and middle-aged people who told me all
sorts of interesting things of "community days," looked through
curious old-fashioned albums of photographs, showing the women in
their bloomers and cropped hair, and the men in the ill-fitting frock-
coats of the respectable mediocre person in early Victorian times. I
think that some of the reminiscences I awakened had been voiceless
for some time. At moments it was like hearing the story of a
flattened, dry, and colorless flower between the pages of a book, of
a verse written in faded ink, or of some daguerreotype spotted and
faint beyond recognition. It was extraordinarily New England in its
quality as I looked back at it all. They claimed a quiet perfection of
soul, they searched one another marvellously for spiritual
chastening, they defied custom and opinion, they followed their
reasoning and their theology to the inmost amazing abnegations—
and they kept themselves solvent by the manufacture of steel traps
that catch the legs of beasts in their strong and pitiless jaws....
But this book is not about the things that concerned Oneida in
community days, and I mention them here only because of the
curious developments of the present time. Years ago, when the
founder, John Humphrey Noyes, grew old and unable to control the
new dissensions that arose out of the sceptical attitude of the
younger generation towards his ingenious theology, and such-like
stresses, communism was abandoned, the religious life and services
discontinued, the concern turned into a joint-stock company, and the
members made shareholders on strictly commercial lines. For some

25. years its prosperity declined. Many of the members went away. But a
nucleus remained as residents in the old buildings, and after a time
there were returns. I was told that in the early days of the new
period there was a violent reaction against communistic methods, a
jealous inexperienced insistence upon property. "It was difficult to
borrow a hammer," said one of my informants.
Then, as the new generation began to feel its feet, came a fresh
development of vitality. The Oneida company began to set up new
machinery, to seek wider markets, to advertise and fight
competitors.
This Mr. P.B. Noyes was the leader into the new paths. He possesses
all the force of character, the constructive passion, the imaginative
power of his progenitor, and it has all gone into business
competition. I have heard much talk of the romance of business,
chiefly from people I heartily despised, but in Mr. Noyes I found
business indeed romantic. It had get hold of him, it possessed him
like a passion. He has inspired all his half-brothers and cousins and
younger fellow-members of the community with his own imaginative
motive. They, too, are enthusiasts for business.
Mr. Noyes is a tall man, who looks down when he talks to one. He
showed me over the associated factories, told me how the trap trade
of all North America is in Oneida's hands, told me of how they fight
and win against the British traps in South America and Burmah. He
showed me photographs of panthers in traps, tigers in traps, bears
snarling at death, unfortunate deer, foxes caught by the paws....
I did my best to forget those photographs at once in the interest of
his admirable machinery, which busied itself with chain-making as
though it had eyes and hands. I went beside him, full of that respect
that a literary man must needs feel when a creative business
controller displays his quality.
"But the old religion of Oneida?" I would interpolate.
"Each one of us is free to follow his own religion. Here is a new sort
of chain we are making for hanging-lamps. Hitherto—"

26. Presently I would try again. "Are the workers here in any way
members of the community?"
"Oh no! Many of them are Italian immigrants. We think of building a
school for them.... No, we get no labor troubles. We pay always
above the trade-union rates, and so we get the pick of the workmen.
Our class of work can't be sweated."...
Yes, he was an astonishing personality, so immensely concentrated
on these efficient manufacturing and trading developments, so
evidently careless of theology, philosophy, social speculation, beauty.
"Your father was a philosopher," I said.
"I think in ten years' time I may give up the control here," he threw
out, "and write something."
"I've thought of the publishing trade myself," I said, "when my wits
are old and stiff."...
I never met a man before so firmly gripped by the romantic
constructive and adventurous element of business, so little
concerned about personal riches or the accumulation of wealth. He
illuminated much that had been dark to me in the American
character. I think better of business by reason of him. And time after
time I tried him upon politics. It came to nothing. Making a new
world was, he thought, a rhetorical flourish about futile and
troublesome activities, and politicians merely a disreputable sort of
parasite upon honorable people who made chains and plated
spoons. All his constructive instincts, all his devotion, were for
Oneida and its enterprises. America was just the impartial space, the
large liberty, in which Oneida grew, the Stars and Stripes a wide
sanction akin to the impartial irresponsible harboring sky overhead.
Sense of the State had never grown in him—can now, I felt
convinced, never grow....
But some day, I like to imagine, the World State, and not Oneida
corporations, and a nobler trade than traps, will command such
services as his.

27. CHAPTER XI
TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT
I
The Riddle of Intolerance
In considering the quality of the American mind (upon which, as I
believe, the ultimate destiny of America entirely depends), it has
been necessary to point out that, considered as one whole, it still
seems lacking in any of that living sense of the state out of which
constructive effort must arise, and that, consequently, enormous
amounts of energy go to waste in anarchistic and chaotically
competitive private enterprise. I believe there are powerful forces at
work in the trend of modern thought, science, and method, in the
direction of bringing order, control, and design into this confused
gigantic conflict, and the discussion of these constructive forces
must necessarily form the crown of my forecast of America's future.
But before I come to that I must deal with certain American traits
that puzzle me, that I cannot completely explain to myself, that dash
my large expectations with an obstinate shadow of foreboding.
Essentially these are disintegrating influences, in the nature of a
fierce intolerance, that lead to conflicts and destroy co-operation.
One makes one's criticism with compunction. One moves through
the American world, meeting constantly with kindness and
hospitality, with a familiar helpfulness that is delightful, with
sympathetic enterprise and energetic imagination, and then
suddenly there flashes out a quality of harshness....
I will explain in a few minutes what I mean by this flash of
harshness. Let me confess here that I cannot determine whether it
is a necessary consequence of American conditions, the scar upon
the soul of too strenuous business competition, or whether it is
something deeper, some subtle, unavoidable infection perhaps in this
soil that was once the Red Indian's battle-ground, some poison, it

28. may be, mingled with this clear exhilarating air. And going with this
harshness there seems also something else, a contempt for abstract
justice that one does not find in any European intelligence—not even
among the English. This contempt may be a correlative of the
intense practicality begotten by a scruple-destroying commercial
training. That, at any rate, is my own prepossession. Conceivably I
am over-disposed to make that tall lady in New York Harbor stand as
a symbol for the liberty of property, and to trace the indisputable
hastiness of life here—it is haste sometimes rather than speed,—its
scorn of æsthetic and abstract issues, this frequent quality of
harshness, and a certain public disorder, whatever indeed mars the
splendid promise and youth of America, to that. I think it is an
accident of the commercial phase that presses men beyond dignity,
patience, and magnanimity. I am loath to believe it is something
fundamentally American.
I have very clearly in my memory the figure of young MacQueen, in
his gray prison clothes in Trenton jail, and how I talked with him. He
and Mr. Booker T. Washington and Maxim Gorky stand for me as
figures in the shadow—symbolical men. I think of America as pride
and promise, as large growth and large courage, all set with
beautiful fluttering bunting, and then my vision of these three men
comes back to me; they return presences inseparable from my
American effect, unlit and uncomplaining on the sunless side of her,
implying rather than voicing certain accusations. America can be
hasty, can be obstinately thoughtless and unjust....
Well, let me set down as shortly as I can how I saw them, and then
go on again with my main thesis.
II
MacQueen
MacQueen is one of those young men England is now making by the
thousand in her elementary schools—a man of that active,
intelligent, mentally hungry, self-educating sort that is giving us our
elementary teachers, our labor members, able journalists, authors,

29. civil servants, and some of the most public-spirited and efficient of
our municipal administrators. He is the sort of man an Englishman
grows prouder of as he sees America and something of her
politicians and labor leaders. After his board-school days MacQueen
went to work as a painter and grainer, and gave his spare energy to
self-education. He mastered German, and read widely and freely. He
corresponded with William Morris, devoured Tolstoy and Bernard
Shaw, followed the Clarion week by week, discussed social
questions, wrote to the newspapers, debated, made speeches. The
English reader will begin to recognize the type. Jail had worn him
when I saw him, but I should think he was always physically
delicate; he wears spectacles, he warms emotionally as he talks. And
he decided, after much excogitation, that the ideal state is one of so
fine a quality of moral training that people will not need coercion and
repressive laws. He calls himself an anarchist—of the early Christian,
Tolstoyan, non-resisting school. Such an anarchist was Emerson,
among other dead Americans whose names are better treasured
than their thoughts. That sort of anarchist has as much connection
with embittered bomb-throwers and assassins as Miss Florence
Nightingale has with the woman Hartmann, who put on a nurse's
uniform to poison and rob....
Well, MacQueen led an active life in England, married, made a
decent living, and took an honorable part in the local affairs of Leeds
until he was twenty-six. Then he conceived a desire for wider
opportunity than England offers men of his class.
In January, 1902, he crossed the Atlantic, and, no doubt, he came
very much aglow with the American idea. He felt that he was
exchanging a decadent country of dwarfing social and political
traditions for a land of limitless outlook. He became a proof-reader in
New York, and began to seek around him for opportunities of
speaking and forwarding social progress. He tried to float a
newspaper. The New York labor-unions found him a useful speaker,
and, among others, the German silk-workers of New York became
aware of him. In June they asked him to go to Paterson to speak in
German to the weavers in that place.

30. The silk-dyers were on strike in Paterson, but the weavers were
weaving "scab-silk," dyed by dyers elsewhere, and it was believed
that the dyers' strike would fail unless they struck also. They had to
be called out. They were chiefly Italians, some Hungarians. It was
felt by the New York German silk-workers that perhaps MacQueen's
German learned in England might meet the linguistic difficulties of
the case.
He went. I hope he will forgive me if I say that his was an extremely
futile expedition. He did very little. He wrote an entirely harmless
article or so in English for La Questione Sociale, and he declined with
horror and publicity to appear upon the same platform with a
mischievous and violent lady anarchist called Emma Goldman. On
June 17, 1902, he went to Paterson again, and spoke to his own
undoing. There is no evidence that he said anything illegal or
inflammatory, there is clear evidence that he bored his audience.
They shouted him down, and called for a prominent local speaker
named Galiano. MacQueen subsided into the background, and
Galiano spoke for an hour in Italian. He aroused great enthusiasm,
and the proceedings terminated with a destructive riot.
Eight witnesses testify to the ineffectual efforts on the part of
MacQueen to combat the violence in progress....
That finishes the story of MacQueen's activities in America, for which
he is now in durance at Trenton. He, in common with a large crowd
and in common, too, with nearly all the witnesses against him, did
commit one offence against the law—he did not go home when
destruction began. He was arrested next day. From that time forth
his fate was out of his hands, and in the control of a number of
people who wanted to "make an example" of the Paterson strikers.
The press took up MacQueen. They began to clothe the bare bones
of this simple little history I have told in fluent, unmitigated lying.
They blackened him, one might think, out of sheer artistic pleasure
in the operation. They called this rather nervous, educated, nobly
meaning if ill-advised young man a "notorious anarchist"; his head-
line title became "Anarchistic MacQueen"; they wrote his "story" in a

31. vein of imaginative fervor; they invented "an unsavory police record"
for him in England; and enlarged upon the marvellous secret
organization for crime of which he was representative and leader. In
a little while MacQueen had ceased to be a credible human being;
he might have been invented by Mr. William le Queux. He was
arrested—Galiano went scot-free—and released on bail. It was
discovered that his pleasant, decent Yorkshire wife and three
children were coming out to America to him, and she became "the
woman Nellie Barton"—her maiden name—and "a socialist of the
Emma Goldman stripe." This, one gathers, is the most horrible stripe
known to American journalism. Had there been a worse one, Mrs.
MacQueen would have been the ex officio. And now here is an
extraordinary thing—public officials began to join in the process. This
is what perplexes me most in this affair. I am told that Assistant-
Secretary-of-the-Treasury H.A. Taylor, without a fact to go upon,
subscribed to the "unsavory record" legend and Assistant-Secretary
C.H. Keep fell in with it. They must have seen what it was they were
indorsing. In a letter from Mr. Keep to the Reverend A.W. Wishart, of
Trenton (who throughout has fought most gallantly for justice in this
case), I find Mr. Keep distinguishes himself by the artistic device of
putting "William MacQueen's" name in inverted commas. So, very
delicately, he conveys out of the void the insinuation that the name
is an alias. Meanwhile the Commissioner of Immigration prepared to
take a hand in the game of breaking up MacQueen. He stopped Mrs.
MacQueen at the threshold of liberty, imprisoned her in Ellis Island,
and sent her back to Europe. MacQueen, still on bail, was not
informed of this action, and waited on the pier for some hours
before he understood. His wife had come second class to America,
but she was returned first class, and the steamship company seized
her goods for the return fare....
That was more than MacQueen could stand. He had been tried,
convicted, sentenced to five years' imprisonment, and he was now
out on bail pending an appeal. Anxiety about his wife and children
was too much for him. He slipped off to England after them ("Escape
of the Anarchist MacQueen"), made what provision and

32. arrangements he could for them, and returned in time to save his
bondsman's money ("Capture of the Escaped Anarchist MacQueen").
Several members of the Leeds City Council ("Criminal Associates in
Europe") saw him off. That was in 1903. His appeal had been
refused on a technical point. He went into Trenton jail, and there he
is to this day. There I saw him. Trenton Jail did not impress me as an
agreeable place. The building is fairly old, and there is no nonsense
about the food. The cells hold, some of them, four criminals, some
of them two, but latterly MacQueen has had spells in the infirmary,
and has managed to get a cell to himself. Many of the criminals are
negroes and half-breeds, imprisoned for unspeakable offences. In
the exercising-yard MacQueen likes to keep apart. "When I first
came I used to get in a corner," he said....
Now this case of MacQueen has exercised my mind enormously. It
was painful to go out of the gray jail again after I had talked to him
—of Shaw and Morris, of the Fabian Society and the British labor
members—into sunlight and freedom, and ever and again, as I went
about New York having the best of times among the most agreeable
people, the figure of him would come back to me quite vividly, in his
gray dress, sitting on the edge of an unaccustomed chair, hands on
his knees, speaking a little nervously and jerkily, and very glad
indeed to see me. He is younger than myself, but much my sort of
man, and we talked of books and education and his case like
brothers. There can be no doubt to any sensible person who will
look into the story of his conviction, who will even go and see him,
that there has been a serious miscarriage of justice.
There has been a serious miscarriage of justice, such as (unhappily)
might happen in any country. That is nothing distinctive of America.
But what does impress me as remarkable and perplexing is the
immense difficulty—the perhaps unsurmountable difficulty—of
getting this man released. The Governor of the State of New Jersey
knows he is innocent, the judges of the Court of Pardons know he is
innocent. Three of them I was able to button-hole at Trenton, and
hear their point of View. Two are of the minority and for release, one
was doubtful in attitude but hostile in spirit. They hold, the man, he

33. thinks, on the score of public policy. They put it that Paterson is a
"hotbed" of crime and violence; that once MacQueen is released
every anarchist in the country will be emboldened to crime, and so
on and so on. I admit Paterson festers, but if we are to punish
anybody instead of reforming the system, it's the masters who ought
to be in jail for that.
"What will the property-owners in Paterson say to us if this man is
released?" one of the judges admitted frankly.
"But he hadn't anything to do with the violence," I said, and argued
the case over again—quite missing the point of that objection.
Whenever I had a chance in New York, in Boston, in Washington,
even amid the conversation of a Washington dinner-table, I dragged
up the case of MacQueen. Nobody seemed indignant. One lady
admitted the sentence was heavy, "he might have been given six
months to cool off in," she said. I protested he ought not to have
been given a day. "Why did he go there?" said a Supreme Court
judge in Washington, a lawyer in New York, and several other
people. "Wasn't he making trouble?" I was asked.
At last that reached my sluggish intelligence.
Yet I still hesitate to accept the new interpretations. Galiano, who
preached blind violence and made the riot, got off scot-free;
MacQueen, who wanted a legitimate strike on British lines, went to
jail. So long as the social injustice, the sweated disorder of
Paterson's industrialism, vents its cries in Italian in La Questione
Sociale, so long as it remains an inaudible misery so far as the great
public is concerned, making vehement yet impotent appeals to mere
force, and so losing its last chances of popular sympathy, American
property, I gather, is content. The masters and the immigrants can
deal with one another on those lines. But to have outsiders coming
in!
There is an active press campaign against the release of "the
Anarchist MacQueen," and I do not believe that Mr. Wishart will

34. succeed in his endeavors. I think MacQueen will serve out his five
years.
The plain truth is that no one pretends he is in jail on his merits; he
is in jail as an example and lesson to any one who proposes to come
between master and immigrant worker in Paterson. He has attacked
the system. The people who profit by the system, the people who
think things are "all right as they are," have hit back in the most
effectual way they can, according to their lights.
That, I think, accounts for the sustained quality of the lying in this
case, and, indeed, for the whole situation. He is in jail on principle
and without personal animus, just as they used to tar and feather
the stray abolitionist on principle in Carolina. The policy of stringent
discouragement is a reasonable one—scoundrelly, no doubt, but
understandable. And I think I can put myself sufficiently into the
place of the Paterson masters, of the Trenton judges, of those
journalists, of those subordinate officials at Washington even, to
understand their motives and inducements. I indulge in no self-
righteous pride. Simply, I thank Heaven I have not had their peculiar
temptations.
But my riddle lies in the attitude of the public—of the American
nation, which hasn't, it seems, a spark of moral indignation for this
sort of thing, which indeed joins in quite cheerfully against the
victim.
It is ill served by its press, no doubt, but surely it understands....
III
Maxim Gorky
Then I assisted at the coming of Maxim Gorky, and witnessed many
intimate details of what Professor Giddings, that courageous
publicist, has called his "lynching."
Here, again, is a case I fail altogether to understand. The surface
values of that affair have a touch of the preposterous. I set them
down in infinite perplexity.

35. My first week in New York was in the period of Gorky's advent.
Expectation was at a high pitch, and one might have foretold a
stupendous, a history-making campaign. The American nation
seemed concentrated upon one great and ennobling idea, the
freedom of Russia, and upon Gorky as the embodiment of that idea.
A protest was to be made against cruelty and violence and
massacre. That great figure of Liberty with the torch was to make it
flare visibly half-way round the world, reproving tyranny.
Gorky arrived, and the éclat was immense. We dined him, we
lunched him, we were photographed in his company by flash-light. I
very gladly shared that honor, for Gorky is not only a great master of
the art I practise, but a splendid personality. He is one of those
people to whom the camera does no justice, whose work, as I know
it in an English translation, forceful as it is, fails very largely to
convey his peculiar quality. His is a big, quiet figure; there is a
curious power of appeal in his face, a large simplicity in his voice and
gesture. He was dressed, when I met him, in peasant clothing, in a
belted blue shirt, trousers of some shiny black material, and boots;
and save for a few common greetings he has no other language
than Russian. So it was necessary that he should bring with him
some one he could trust to interpret him to the world. And having,
too, much of the practical helplessness of his type of genius, he
could not come without his right hand, that brave and honorable
lady, Madame Andreieva, who has been now for years in everything
but the severest legal sense his wife. Russia has no Dakota; and
although his legal wife has long since found another companion, the
Orthodox Church in Russia has no divorce facilities for men in the
revolutionary camp. So Madame Andreieva stands to him as George
Eliot stood to George Lewes, and I suppose the two of them had
almost forgotten the technical illegality of their tie, until it burst upon
them and the American public in a monstrous storm of exposure.
It was like a summer thunder-storm. At one moment Gorky was in
an immense sunshine, a plenipotentiary from oppression to liberty,
at the next he was being almost literally pelted through the streets.

36. I do not know what motive actuated a certain section of the
American press to initiate this pelting of Maxim Gorky. A passion for
moral purity may perhaps have prompted it, but certainly no passion
for purity ever before begot so brazen and abundant a torrent of
lies. It was precisely the sort of campaign that damned poor
MacQueen, but this time on an altogether imperial scale. The
irregularity of Madame Andreieva's position was a mere point of
departure. The journalists went on to invent a deserted wife and
children, they declared Madame Andreieva was an "actress," and
loaded her with all the unpleasant implications of that unfortunate
word; they spoke of her generally as "the woman Andreieva"; they
called upon the Commissioner of Immigration to deport her as a
"female of bad character"; quite influential people wrote to him to
that effect; they published the name of the hotel that sheltered her,
and organized a boycott. Whoever dared to countenance the victims
was denounced. Professor Dewar of Columbia had given them a
reception; "Dewar must go," said the head-lines. Mark Twain, who
had assisted in the great welcome, was invited to recant and
contribute unfriendly comments. The Gorkys were pursued with
insult from hotel to hotel. Hotel after hotel turned them out. They
found themselves at last, after midnight, in the streets of New York
city with every door closed against them. Infected persons could not
have been treated more abominably in a town smitten with a panic
of plague.
This change happened in the course of twenty-four hours. On one
day Gorky was at the zenith, on the next he had been swept from
the world. To me it was astounding—it was terrifying. I wanted to
talk to Gorky about it, to find out the hidden springs of this amazing
change. I spent a Sunday evening looking for him with an ever-
deepening respect for the power of the American press. I had a
quaint conversation with the clerk of the hotel in Fifth Avenue from
which he had first been driven. Europeans can scarcely hope to
imagine the moral altitudes at which American hotels are
conducted.... I went thence to seek Mr. Abraham Cahan in the East

37. Side, and thence to other people I knew, but in vain. Gorky was
obliterated.
I thought this affair was a whirlwind of foolish misunderstanding,
such as may happen in any capital, and that presently his entirely
tolerable relationship would be explained. But for all the rest of my
time in New York this insensate campaign went on. There was no
attempt of any importance to stem the tide, and to this day large
sections of the American public must be under the impression that
this great writer is a depraved man of pleasure accompanied by a
favorite cocotte. The writers of paragraphs racked their brains to
invent new and smart ways of insulting Madame Andreieva. The
chaste entertainers of the music-halls of the Tenderloin district
introduced allusions. And amid this riot of personalities Russia was
forgotten. The massacres, the chaos of cruelty and blundering, the
tyranny, the women outraged, the children tortured and slain—all
that was forgotten. In Boston, in Chicago, it was the same. At the
bare suggestion of Gorky's coming the same outbreak occurred, the
same display of imbecile gross lying, the same absolute disregard of
the tragic cause he had come to plead.
One gleam of comedy in this remarkable outbreak I recall. Some one
in ineffectual protest had asked what Americans would have said if
Benjamin Franklin had encountered such ignominies on his similar
mission of appeal to Paris before the War of Independence.
"Benjamin Franklin," retorted one bright young Chicago journalist,
"was a man of very different moral character from Gorky," and
proceeded to explain how Chicago was prepared to defend the purity
of her homes against the invader. Benjamin Franklin, it is true, was a
person of very different morals from Gorky—but I don't think that
bright young man in Chicago had a very sound idea of where the
difference lay.
I spent my last evening on American soil in the hospitable home in
Staten Island that sheltered Gorky and Madame Andreieva. After
dinner we sat together in the deepening twilight upon a broad
veranda that looks out upon one of the most beautiful views in the

38. world, upon serene large spaces of land and sea, upon slopes of
pleasant, window-lit, tree-set wooden houses, upon the glittering
clusters of lights, and the black and luminous shipping that comes
and goes about the Narrows and the Upper Bay. Half masked by a
hill contour to the left was the light of the torch of Liberty.... Gorky's
big form fell into shadow, Madame Andreieva sat at his feet,
translating methodically, sentence by sentence, into clear French
whatever he said, translating our speeches into Russian. He told us
stories—of the soul of the Russian, of Russian religious sects, of
kindnesses and cruelties, of his great despair.
Ever and again, in the pauses, my eyes would go to where New York
far away glittered like a brighter and more numerous Pleiades.
I gauged something of the real magnitude of this one man's
disappointment, the immense expectation of his arrival, the
impossible dream of his mission. He had come—the Russian peasant
in person, out of a terrific confusion of bloodshed, squalor, injustice
—to tell America, the land of light and achieved freedom, of all these
evil things. She would receive him, help him, understand truly what
he meant with his "Rossia." I could imagine how he had felt as he
came in the big steamer to her, up that large converging display of
space and teeming energy. There she glowed to-night across the
water, a queen among cities, as if indeed she was the light of the
world. Nothing, I think, can ever rob that splendid harbor approach
of its invincible quality of promise.... And to him she had shown
herself no more than the luminous hive of multitudes of base and
busy, greedy and childish little men.
MacQueen in jail, Gorky with his reputation wantonly bludgeoned
and flung aside; they are just two chance specimens of the myriads
who have come up this great waterway bearing hope and gifts.
CHAPTER XII

39. THE TRAGEDY OF COLOR
I
Harsh Judgments
I seem to find the same hastiness and something of the same note of
harshness that strike me in the cases of MacQueen and Gorky in
America's treatment of her colored population. I am aware how
intricate, how multitudinous, the aspects of this enormous question
have become, but looking at it in the broad and transitory manner I
have proposed for myself in these papers, it does seem to present
many parallel elements. There is the same disposition towards an
indiscriminating verdict, the same disregard of proportion as
between small evils and great ones, the same indifference to the fact
that the question does not stand alone, but is a part, and this time a
by no means small part, in the working out of America's destinies.
In regard to the colored population, just as in regard to the great
and growing accumulations of unassimilated and increasingly
unpopular Jews, and to the great and growing multitudes of Roman
Catholics whose special education contradicts at so many points
those conceptions of individual judgment and responsibility upon
which America relies, I have attempted time after time to get some
answer from the Americans I have met to what is to me the most
obvious of questions. "Your grandchildren and the grandchildren of
these people will have to live in this country side by side; do you
propose, do you believe it possible, that under the increasing
pressure of population and competition they should be living then in
just the same relations that you and these people are living now; if
you do not, then what relations do you propose shall exist between
them?"
It is not too much to say that I have never once had the beginnings
of an answer to this question. Usually one is told with great gravity
that the problem of color is one of the most difficult that we have to
consider, and the conversation then breaks up into discursive
anecdotes and statements about black people. One man will dwell

40. upon the uncontrollable violence of a black man's evil passions (in
Jamaica and Barbadoes colored people form an overwhelming
proportion of the population, and they have behaved in an
exemplary fashion for the last thirty years); another will dilate upon
the incredible stupidity of the full-blooded negro (during my stay in
New York the prize for oratory at Columbia University, oratory which
was the one redeeming charm of Daniel Webster, was awarded to a
Zulu of unmitigated blackness); a third will speak of his physical
offensiveness, his peculiar smell which necessitates his social
isolation (most well-to-do Southerners are brought up by negro
"mammies"); others, again, will enter upon the painful history of the
years that followed the war, though it seems a foolish thing to let
those wrongs of the past dominate the outlook for the future. And
one charming Southern lady expressed the attitude of mind of a
whole class very completely, I think, when she said, "You have to be
one of us to feel this question at all as it ought to be felt."
There, I think, I got something tangible. These emotions are a cult.
My globe-trotting impudence will seem, no doubt, to mount to its
zenith when I declare that hardly any Americans at all seem to be in
possession of the elementary facts in relation to this question. These
broad facts are not taught, as of course they ought to be taught, in
school; and what each man knows is picked up by the accidents of
his own untrained observation, by conversation always tinctured by
personal prejudice, by hastily read newspapers and magazine
articles and the like. The quality of this discussion is very variable,
but on the whole pretty low. While I was in New York opinion was
greatly swayed by an article in, if I remember rightly, the Century
Magazine, by a gentleman who had deduced from a few weeks'
observation in the slums of Khartoum the entire incapacity of the
negro to establish a civilization of his own. He never had, therefore
he never could; a discouraging ratiocination. We English, a century
or so ago, said all these things of the native Irish. If there is any
trend of opinion at all in this matter at present, it lies in the direction
of a generous decision on the part of the North and West to leave
the black more and more to the judgment and mercy of the white

41. people with whom he is locally associated. This judgment and mercy
points, on the whole, to an accentuation of the colored man's natural
inferiority, to the cessation of any other educational attempts than
those that increase his industrial usefulness (it is already illegal in
Louisiana to educate him above a contemptible level), to his
industrial exploitation through usury and legal chicanery, and to a
systematic strengthening of the social barriers between colored
people of whatever shade and the whites.
Meanwhile, in this state of general confusion, in the absence of any
determining rules or assumptions, all sorts of things are happening—
according to the accidents of local feeling. In Massachusetts you
have people with, I am afraid, an increasing sense of sacrifice to
principle, lunching and dining with people of color. They do it less
than they did, I was told. Massachusetts stands, I believe, at the top
of the scale of tolerant humanity. One seems to reach the bottom at
Springfield, Missouri, which is a county seat with a college, an
academy, a high school, and a zoological garden. There the
exemplary method reaches the nadir. Last April three unfortunate
negroes were burned to death, apparently because they were
negroes, and as a general corrective of impertinence. They seem to
have been innocent of any particular offence. It was a sort of racial
sacrament. The edified Sunday-school children hurried from their
gospel-teaching to search for souvenirs among the ashes, and
competed with great spirit for a fragment of charred skull.
It is true that in this latter case Governor Folk acted with vigor and
justice, and that the better element of Springfield society was
evidently shocked when it was found that quite innocent negroes
had been used in these instructive pyrotechnics; but the fact
remains that a large and numerically important section of the
American public does think that fierce and cruel reprisals are a
necessary part of the system of relationships between white and
colored man. In our dispersed British community we have almost
exactly the same range between our better attitudes and our worse
—I'm making no claim of national superiority. In London, perhaps,
we out-do Massachusetts in liberality; in the National Liberal Club or

42. the Reform a black man meets all the courtesies of humanity—as
though there was no such thing as color. But, on the other hand, the
Cape won't bear looking into for a moment. The same conditions
give the same results; a half-educated white population of British or
Dutch or German ingredients greedy for gain, ill controlled and
feebly influenced, in contact with a black population, is bound to
reproduce the same brutal and stupid aggressions, the same half-
honest prejudices to justify those aggressions, the same ugly, mean
excuses. "Things are better in Jamaica and Barbadoes," said I, in a
moment of patriotic weakness, to Mr. Booker T. Washington.
"Eh!" said he, and thought in that long silent way he has.... "They're
worse in South Africa—much. Here we've got a sort of light. We
know generally what we've got to stand. There—"
His words sent my memory back to some conversations I had quite
recently with a man from a dry-goods store in Johannesburg. He
gave me clearly enough the attitude of the common white out there;
the dull prejudice; the readiness to take advantage of the "boy"; the
utter disrespect for colored womankind; the savage, intolerant
resentment, dashed dangerously with fear, which the native arouses
in him. (Think of all that must have happened in wrongful practice
and wrongful law and neglected educational possibilities before our
Zulus in Natal were goaded to face massacre, spear against rifle!)
The rare and culminating result of education and experience is to
enable men to grasp facts, to balance justly among their fluctuating
and innumerable aspects, and only a small minority in our world is
educated to that pitch. Ignorant people can think only in types and
abstractions, can achieve only emphatic absolute decisions, and
when the commonplace American or the commonplace colonial
Briton sets to work to "think over" the negro problem, he instantly
banishes most of the material evidence from his mind—clears for
action, as it were. He forgets the genial carriage of the ordinary
colored man, his beaming face, his kindly eye, his rich, jolly voice,
his touching and trusted friendliness, his amiable, unprejudiced
readiness to serve and follow a white man who seems to know what
he is doing. He forgets—perhaps he has never seen—the dear

43. humanity of these people, their slightly exaggerated vanity, their
innocent and delightful love of color and song, their immense
capacity for affection, the warm romantic touch in their
imaginations. He ignores the real fineness of the indolence that
despises servile toil, of the carelessness that disdains the watchful
aggressive economies, day by day, now a wretched little gain here
and now a wretched little gain there, that make the dirty fortune of
the Russian Jews who prey upon color in the Carolinas. No; in the
place of all these tolerable every-day experiences he lets his
imagination go to work upon a monster, the "real nigger."
"Ah! You don't know the real nigger," said one American to me when
I praised the colored people I had seen. "You should see the buck
nigger down South, Congo brand. Then you'd understand, sir."
His voice, his face had a gleam of passionate animosity.
One could see he had been brooding himself out of all relations to
reality in this matter. He was a man beyond reason or pity. He was
obsessed. Hatred of that imaginary diabolical "buck nigger"
blackened his soul. It was no good to talk to him of the "buck
American, Packingtown brand," or the "buck Englishman, suburban
race-meeting type," and to ask him if these intensely disagreeable
persons justified outrages on Senator Lodge, let us say, or Mrs.
Longworth. No reply would have come from him. "You don't
understand the question," he would have answered. "You don't
know how we Southerners feel."
Well, one can make a tolerable guess.
II
The White Strain
I certainly did not begin to realize one most important aspect of this
question until I reached America. I thought of those eight millions as
of men, black as ink. But when I met Mr. Booker T. Washington, for
example, I met a man certainly as white in appearance as our
Admiral Fisher, who is, as a matter of fact, quite white. A very large
proportion of these colored people, indeed, is more than half white.

44. One hears a good deal about the high social origins of the Southern
planters, very many derive indisputably from the first families of
England. It is the same blood flows in these mixed colored people's
veins. Just think of the sublime absurdity, therefore, of the ban.
There are gentlemen of education and refinement, qualified lawyers
and doctors, whose ancestors assisted in the Norman Conquest, and
they dare not enter a car marked "white" and intrude upon the
dignity of the rising loan-monger from Esthonia. For them the "Jim
Crow" car....
One tries to put that aspect to the American in vain. "These people,"
you say, "are nearer your blood, nearer your temper, than any of
those bright-eyed, ringleted immigrants on the East Side. Are you
ashamed of your poor relations? Even if you don't like the half, or
the quarter of negro blood, you might deal civilly with the three-
quarters white. It doesn't say much for your faith in your own racial
prepotency, anyhow."...
The answer to that is usually in terms of mania.
"Let me tell you a little story just to illustrate," said one deponent to
me in an impressive undertone—"just to illustrate, you know.... A
few years ago a young fellow came to Boston from New Orleans.
Looked all right. Dark—but he explained that by an Italian
grandmother. Touch of French in him, too. Popular. Well, he made
advances to a Boston girl—good family. Gave a fairly straight
account of himself. Married."
He paused. "Course of time—offspring. Little son."
His eye made me feel what was coming.
"Was it by any chance very, very black?" I whispered.
"Yes, sir. Black! Black as your hat. Absolutely negroid. Projecting
jaw, thick lips, frizzy hair, flat nose—everything....
"But consider the mother's feelings, sir, consider that! A pure-
minded, pure white woman!"

45. What can one say to a story of this sort, when the taint in the blood
surges up so powerfully as to blacken the child at birth beyond even
the habit of the pure-blooded negro? What can you do with a public
opinion made of this class of ingredient? And this story of the
lamentable results of intermarriage was used, not as an argument
against intermarriage, but as an argument against the extension of
quite rudimentary civilities to the men of color. "If you eat with
them, you've got to marry them," he said, an entirely fabulous post-
prandial responsibility.
It is to the tainted whites my sympathies go out. The black or mainly
black people seem to be fairly content with their inferiority; one sees
them all about the States as waiters, cab-drivers, railway porters, car
attendants, laborers of various sorts, a pleasant, smiling,
acquiescent folk. But consider the case of a man with a broader
brain than such small uses need, conscious, perhaps, of exceptional
gifts, capable of wide interests and sustained attempts, who is
perhaps as English as you or I, with just a touch of color in his eyes,
in his lips, in his fingernails, and in his imagination. Think of the
accumulating sense of injustice he must bear with him through life,
the perpetual slight and insult he must undergo from all that is
vulgar and brutal among the whites! Something of that one may
read in the sorrowful pages of Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk.
They would have made Alexandre Dumas travel in the Jim Crow car
if he had come to Virginia. But I can imagine some sort of protest on
the part of that admirable but extravagant man.... They even talk of
"Jim Crow elevators" now in Southern hotels.
At Hull House, in Chicago, I was present at a conference of colored
people—Miss Jane Addams efficiently in control—to consider the
coming of a vexatious play, "The Clansman," which seems to have
been written and produced entirely to exacerbate racial feeling. Both
men and women were present, business people, professional men,
and their wives; the speaking was clear, temperate, and wonderfully
to the point, high above the level of any British town council I have
ever attended. One lady would have stood out as capable and
charming in any sort of public discussion in England—though we are

46. not wanting in good women speakers—and she was at least three-
quarters black....
And while I was in Chicago, too, I went to the Peking Theatre—a
"coon" music-hall—and saw something of a lower level of colored
life. The common white, I must explain, delights in calling colored
people "coons," and the negro, so far as I could learn, uses no
retaliatory word. It was a "variety" entertainment, with one turn, at
least, of quite distinguished merit, good-humored and brisk
throughout. I watched keenly, and I could detect nothing of that trail
of base suggestion one would find as a matter of course in a music-
hall in such English towns as Brighton and Portsmouth. What one
heard of kissing and love-making was quite artless and simple
indeed. The negro, it seemed to me, did this sort of thing with a
better grace and a better temper than a Londoner, and shows, I
think, a finer self-respect. He thinks more of deportment, he bears
himself more elegantly by far than the white at the same social level.
The audience reminded me of the sort of gathering one would find
in a theatre in Camden Town or Hoxton. There were a number of
family groups, the girls brightly dressed, and young couples quite of
the London music-hall type. Clothing ran "smart," but not smarter
than it would be among fairly prosperous north London Jews. There
was no gallery—socially—no collection of orange-eating, interrupting
hooligans at all. Nobody seemed cross, nobody seemed present for
vicious purposes, and everybody was sober. Indeed, there and
elsewhere I took and confirmed a mighty liking to these gentle,
human, dark-skinned people.
III
Mr. Booker T. Washington
But whatever aspect I recall of this great taboo that shows no signs
of lifting, of this great problem of the future that America in her
haste, her indiscriminating prejudice, her lack of any sustained study
and teaching of the broad issues she must decide, complicates and
intensifies, and makes threatening, there presently comes back to

47. mind the browned face of Mr. Booker T. Washington, as he talked to
me over our lunch in Boston.
He has a face rather Irish in type, and the soft slow negro voice. He
met my regard with the brown sorrowful eyes of his race. He wanted
very much that I should hear him make a speech, because then his
words came better; he talked, he implied, with a certain difficulty.
But I preferred to have his talking, and get not the orator—every
one tells me he is an altogether great orator in this country where
oratory is still esteemed—but the man.
He answered my questions meditatively. I wanted to know with an
active pertinacity. What struck me most was the way in which his
sense of the overpowering forces of race prejudice weighs upon him.
It is a thing he accepts; in our time and conditions it is not to be
fought about. He makes one feel with an exaggerated intensity
(though I could not even draw him to admit) its monstrous injustice.
He makes no accusations. He is for taking it as a part of the present
fate of his "people," and for doing all that can be done for them
within the limit it sets.
Therein he differs from Du Bois, the other great spokesman color
has found in our time. Du Bois, is more of the artist, less of the
statesman; he conceals his passionate resentment all too thinly. He
batters himself into rhetoric against these walls. He will not
repudiate the clear right of the black man to every educational
facility, to equal citizenship, and equal respect. But Mr. Washington
has statecraft. He looks before and after, and plans and keeps his
counsel with the scope and range of a statesman. I use "statesman"
in its highest sense; his is a mind that can grasp the situation and
destinies of a people. After I had talked to him I went back to my
club, and found there an English newspaper with a report of the
opening debate upon Mr. Birrell's Education Bill. It was like turning
from the discussion of life and death to a dispute about the dregs in
the bottom of a tea-cup somebody had neglected to wash up in
Victorian times.

48. I argued strongly against the view he seems to hold that black and
white might live without mingling and without injustice, side by side.
That I do not believe. Racial differences seem to me always to
exasperate intercourse unless people have been elaborately trained
to ignore them. Uneducated men are as bad as cattle in persecuting
all that is different among themselves. The most miserable and
disorderly countries of the world are the countries where two races,
two inadequate cultures, keep a jarring, continuous separation. "You
must repudiate separation," I said. "No peoples have ever yet
endured the tension of intermingled distinctness."
"May we not become a peculiar people—like the Jews?" he
suggested. "Isn't that possible?"
But there I could not agree with him. I thought of the dreadful
history of the Jews and Armenians. And the negro cannot do what
the Jews and Armenians have done. The colored people of America
are of a different quality from the Jew altogether, more genial, more
careless, more sympathetic, franker, less intellectual, less acquisitive,
less wary and restrained—in a word, more Occidental. They have no
common religion and culture, no conceit of race to hold them
together. The Jews make a ghetto for themselves wherever they go;
no law but their own solidarity has given America the East Side. The
colored people are ready to disperse and inter-breed, are not a
community at all in the Jewish sense, but outcasts from a
community. They are the victims of a prejudice that has to be
destroyed. These things I urged, but it was, I think, empty speech to
my hearer. I could talk lightly of destroying that prejudice, but he
knew better. It is the central fact of his life, a law of his being. He
has shaped all his projects and policy upon that. Exclusion is
inevitable. So he dreams of a colored race of decent and
inaggressive men silently giving the lie to all the legend of their
degradation. They will have their own doctors, their own lawyers,
their own capitalists, their own banks—because the whites desire it
so. But will the uneducated whites endure even so submissive a
vindication as that? Will they suffer the horrid spectacle of free and

49. self-satisfied negroes in decent clothing on any terms without
resentment?
He explained how at the Tuskegee Institute they make useful men,
skilled engineers, skilled agriculturalists, men to live down the
charge of practical incompetence, of ignorant and slovenly farming
and house management....
"I wish you would tell me," I said, abruptly, "just what you think of
the attitude of white America towards you. Do you think it is
generous?"
He regarded me for a moment. "No end of people help us," he said.
"Yes," I said; "but the ordinary man. Is he fair?"
"Some things are not fair," he said, leaving the general question
alone. "It isn't fair to refuse a colored man a berth on a sleeping-car.
I?—I happen to be a privileged person, they make an exception for
me; but the ordinary educated colored man isn't admitted to a
sleeping-car at all. If he has to go a long journey, he has to sit up all
night. His white competitor sleeps. Then in some places, in the
hotels and restaurants—It's all right here in Boston—but southwardly
he can't get proper refreshments. All that's a handicap....
"The remedy lies in education," he said; "ours—and theirs.
"The real thing," he told me, "isn't to be done by talking and
agitation. It's a matter of lives. The only answer to it all is for
colored men to be patient, to make themselves competent, to do
good work, to live well, to give no occasion against us. We feel that.
In a way it's an inspiration....
"There is a man here in Boston, a negro, who owns and runs some
big stores, employs all sorts of people, deals justly. That man has
done more good for our people than all the eloquence or argument
in the world.... That is what we have to do—it is all we can do."...
Whatever America has to show in heroic living to-day, I doubt if she
can show anything finer than the quality of the resolve, the steadfast
effort hundreds of black and colored men are making to-day to live

50. blamelessly, honorably, and patiently, getting for themselves what
scraps of refinement, learning, and beauty they may, keeping their
hold on a civilization they are grudged and denied. They do it not for
themselves only, but for all their race. Each educated colored man is
an ambassador to civilization. They know they have a handicap, that
they are not exceptionally brilliant nor clever people. Yet every such
man stands, one likes to think, aware of his representative and
vicarious character, fighting against foul imaginations,
misrepresentations, injustice, insult, and the naïve unspeakable
meannesses of base antagonists. Every one of them who keeps
decent and honorable does a little to beat that opposition down.
But the patience the negro needs! He may not even look contempt.
He must admit superiority in those whose daily conduct to him is the
clearest evidence of moral inferiority. We sympathetic whites,
indeed, may claim honor for him; if he is wise he will be silent under
our advocacy. He must go to and fro self-controlled, bereft of all the
equalities that the great flag of America proclaims—that flag for
whose united empire his people fought and died, giving place and
precedence to the strangers who pour in to share its beneficence,
strangers ignorant even of its tongue. That he must do—and wait.
The Welsh, the Irish, the Poles, the white South, the indefatigable
Jews may cherish grievances and rail aloud. He must keep still. They
may be hysterical, revengeful, threatening, and perverse; their
wrongs excuse them. For him there is no excuse. And of all the races
upon earth, which has suffered such wrongs as this negro blood that
is still imputed to him as a sin? These people who disdain him, who
have no sense of reparation towards him, have sinned against him
beyond all measure....
No, I can't help idealizing the dark submissive figure of the negro in
this spectacle of America. He, too, seems to me to sit waiting—and
waiting with a marvellous and simple-minded patience—for finer
understandings and a nobler time.

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